The Humans Read Online Free PDF Page B

a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.
    Ha!
    Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other
people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital,
swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used
to annihilate bacteria.
    My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had
towards single-celled organisms.
I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene.
But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaking,
camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.

Mad people
    Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear
and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do
so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.
    Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of
grass.

The cubic root of 912,673
    After a while, my wife came to visit. Isobel Martin, in person. Author of
The Dark Ages
. I wanted to be repulsed by her, as that would make everything easier. I wanted
to be horrified and, of course, I was, because the whole species was horrific to me. On that first encounter I thought she was hideous. I was frightened of her. I was frightened of everything here,
now. It was an undeniable truth. To be on Earth was to be frightened. I was even frightened by the sight of my own hands. But anyway, Isobel. When I first saw her I saw nothing but a few trillion
poorly arranged, mediocre cells. She had a pale face and tired eyes and a narrow, but still protruding
nose
. There was something very poised and upright about her, something very contained.
She seemed, even more than most, to be holding something back. My mouth dried just looking at her. I suppose if there was a challenge with this particular human it was that I was meant to know her
very well, and also that I was going to be spending more time with her, to glean the information I needed, before doing what I had to do.
    She came to see me in my room, while a nurse watched. It was, of course, another test. Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
    I was dreading her hugging me, or kissing me, or blowing air into my ear or any of those other human things the magazine had told me about, but she didn’t. She didn’t even seem to
want
to do that. What she wanted to do was sit there and stare at me, as if I were the cubic root of 912,673 and she was trying to work me out. And indeed, I tried very hard to act as
harmoniously as that. The indestructible ninety-seven. My favourite prime.
    Isobel smiled and nodded at the nurse, but when she sat down and faced me I realised she was exhibiting a few universal signs of fear – tight facial muscles, dilated pupils, fast
breathing. I paid special attention to her hair now. She had dark hair growing out of the top and rear of her head which extended to just above her shoulders where it halted abruptly to form a
straight horizontal line. This was